Strangely enough, as I drove yesterday, my mind on the family tree that is eating up my life (I swear, the high point of my day was an email exchange with Pome that led to me to the realization that there is a whole host of free services at the National Archives I haven’t tapped into yet.  And you better believe I will), I thought about whether or not I would still be saying the word “fuck “when I’m a great-grandmother.

Women in past generations — from what I understand based on movies and Abraham Cahan books — didn’t curse.  I never so much as heard my great-grandmother utter the word “damn.”  I mean, to be fair, she didn’t speak a lot of English so perhaps she never got to curse words in language acquisition (though while I only know two-and-a-half languages, I can swear in close to twenty).  I don’t think I ever heard my grandmother say anything saucier than “shit.”  And my own mother has commented before on my filthy mouth.

I wondered if perhaps as I aged, I would become a sweet old lady who said things like “oh fudge!” as I rocked in my rocking chair.  I wondered how one went about shedding a potty mouth.  Was it a natural progression, something that would come on like menopause, where I would realize one day that it had been at least a month since the last time I had said “fuck” and now it felt more comfortable to say things like “fiddlesticks!” than it did to say its baser alternative?  Or was it going to have to be a conscious decision, much in the same way the twins needed to pick a date and give up the binky?  Will I have to choose — let’s say — the date I begin wearing dentures will be the last day I say any of that shit?

And then, I just read that Adele has allegedly given up swearing as she prepares for the birth of her child.

Isn’t Adele 24 years old?  She’s going to give up curse words in her twenties?  Doesn’t she know that the ability to utter curse words may have a lifespan much like her fertility?  Who the hell willingly gives up cursing in prime cursing years?

Why doesn’t she do what every other person who curses regularly does once they find themselves parenting?  We say curse words in places other than the space where our child(ren) happen to be in the moment.  Just in the same way I spoke in the classroom in a different way than I spoke at my locker back in high school, I speak with Josh in a very different way that I speak in front of the twins.  When they’re around, it’s a clean mouth that would make my grandmother proud.  When they’re not around, it’s sailor-time.

Wait.

Is there a chance my great-grandmother was doing this to me too?  That when I was away, she was laughing with all the other ladies at the nursing home as they cursed their way through a discussion on man meat?  And then I’d step in the room and she’d switch it over to cleany kidville where she handed me silver dollars and called me a “nice-a little-a girl.”

No.

Wait.

Remember the Abraham Cahan books.  Ladies didn’t curse back then.  I’m safe.

Okay, so back to us.  Are you still going to be cursing when you’re a great-grandmother, or will you be washing out your own mouth with soap a la Adele at some point?

Ooooh, and don’t tell me that you don’t curse.  That only serves to make me feel badly about my unladylike tendencies.

Like many children of a certain age, the ChickieNob is obsessed with American Girl dolls and all their accompanying paraphernalia, especially the books.  The books begin with a family tree for the girl, usually containing the characters you’re about to meet in the story.  Okay, I’m making an assumption with that; I haven’t actually read any of the American Girl doll books.  I don’t need to.  She speaks about them incessantly.  And she’s slowly morphing into Rebecca with her cross-stitching, but that is a post for another day.

The Wolvog’s second camp is an all-day camp, whereas the ChickieNob’s second camp is a half-day camp, and it is the first time they have truly been apart for an extended period of time since birth.  This fact did not hit the ChickieNob until the front door closed on the first day, and her brother got in the car and drove away, leaving her behind.  I suggested that in the hours we had to ourselves, we should work on the American Girl-style family tree that she has been wanting to construct.  Come on, I’m just as much fun as your same-age brother, kid!

Right after the twins were born, I constructed a family tree for Josh’s grandmother’s side and his grandmother helped me with her husband’s side too.  I already had one for my mother’s side that my cousins and I constructed years ago with the help of our grandparent’s generation.  I thought this would be easy peasy lemon squeezy, and I was so confident that we could finish this in a few days that our first order of business was to purchase a large sheet of paper and disposable rapidograph pens with archival ink.  Instead of starting, we went to Starbucks to gaily drink frappuccinos and congratulate ourselves early on a job well done.

The next day I looked at the papers and realized that we were missing a lot of people.  Like A LOT of people.  We were missing people’s spouses and children.  We were missing everyone from my father’s and Josh’s father’s families.  I told the ChickieNob that this wasn’t a problem; I’d just call up some family members and have them fill in the blanks.

I started with my great-aunt who couldn’t answer any of my questions, but told me to contact a relative I had never heard anyone mention.  I mean, literally, she pulled this name out of thin air, promising that this woman would be able to help.  So I called this stranger in California and introduced myself and had the most amazing conversation for over an hour with this woman whose grandmother was my great-grandmother’s sister.  It was like finding an unopened letter from my grandmother years after her death.  It was such a profound loss when my grandmother died a few years ago; not just in terms of missing the person, but missing the information she contained.  And here was this person who not only knew my grandmother but was happy to spend an hour on the phone telling me stories about their collective childhood.

I didn’t want to get off the phone with her.  I actually wanted to fly across the country and sit down in her living room and burst into tears.  But I thought that might make me look a little crazy.

And I had to make dinner and she had to pack, but she promised to send me more information when she was finished with a trip, so I moved on to my father who couldn’t plug in any holes that I had for his family, since I could list everyone up to my great-grandparents on my own.  So as he went to ask his family members if anyone knew any other names, I went online and found my two great-grandfather’s draft cards.  I think that was the turning point for me, when it went from being a lark to an obsession.

The ChickieNob by this point had ditched me to go play dolls, and I turned to Loribeth to grill her in all things genealogy, deciding that we now needed family tree software to keep track of things.  I got in contact with one of my mother’s cousins — a man who has never met me before — and placed the plans for our phone conversation on the calendar as if it were akin to a birthday party.  I was birthing myself and discovering where I came from; who I’m connected to in this world.  Josh contacted his family members, and I continued to Google, finding relatives across Facebook whose names I hadn’t even known prior to this point.

It has become all I feel like doing lately.  The ChickieNob is happy enough to sit at the table and draw while I sketch out chunks of our family tree on taped-together pieces of paper.  I think she is losing hope of me completing her wall-hanging despite the fact that I keep telling her that this is a rough draft, that I’ll have it finished in no time.

It has brought the topic of adoption to the forefront of my mind.  On one hand, I’m finding that I’m focusing less on physical characteristics and more about undigging a story.  At first I only copied the front of each of my great-grandfather’s draft cards which contained their address and signature and place of employment.  I went back to make a copy of the back of the card which listed height and hair colour.  And yet, how are we not focusing on genetics when we look at a family tree?  It made me understand (a bit; I don’t think someone not going through it themselves could fully understand) the loss inherent in adoption, even while seeing that a family tree is comprised both of genetic relations and people who marry in, who take the family tree on wonderful, divergent paths.

And I’m going to be frank; I am completely unable to let this project go, but it is also making me incredibly sad.  Like “lie on the bed on my side while facing Josh and talking about how our great-grandchildren will one day think of us only in terms of a story they discover for their own children” sad.  That we’ll be dead and gone, and our families will keep going on without us.  And if it isn’t that thought bringing me down, it is missing people so badly that I visit documents containing their names even when I know all there is to know from those documents.  I looked up my grandfather’s family on an old census, finding his name and his brother’s written below his parents, his sister not yet born, and my throat ached thinking about my grandfather who has been gone for years, and yet on this screen, he is trapped in youth, like a butterfly in glass.  A pause in time.

Genealogy is such a bizarre puzzle, dealing with human pieces and shifting them around to make them fit.  It is so easy to forget these people were once alive, once here, at one time more than just their name and birth date and death date.  Even though I can imagine the looks on their faces when the ships docked in the ports, bringing them away from everything they knew, placing them in my strange land.

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop. MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings, though you can read them or participate any time — the comment section is always open for people to post a link to their work or ask a question. You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.” If this is your first time in “class,” you may want to jump back to the first post in the series in order to understand how things work, or peruse all of the past lessons as well as a glossary of terms by reading the MFA Sunday School Glossary and Course Archives.

You are a writer, and like all people who create things, you are going to run into rejection.  You will be rejected when you write a blog post and no one reads it/comments on it/or comments negatively.  You will be rejected when you query agents.  You will be rejected when you submit your work to magazines or publishers.  You will be rejected when you find an agent to take on your project and they are shopping it around.  You will be rejected when you ask for book blurbs or reviews of your book.  And finally, you will be rejected by the very people who take the time to read your work and don’t like it.

Enjoy!

The question at the heart of this is why put yourself through it knowing that this is the case?  That all writers are doomed to experience heaps and heaps of rejection with only a few tasty morsels of accolades to sustain them from project to project.  Why would anyone choose to live that way?

I think it was best explained by Ethel Merman and company in Gypsy:

The costumes, the scenery, the makeup, the props
The audience that lifts you when you’re down
The headaches, the heartaches, the backaches, the flops
The sheriff who escorts you out of town
The opening when your heart beats like a drum
The closing when the customers won’t come
There’s no business like show business
Like no business I know
Everything about it is appealing

Okay, so not everything about the writing life is appealing, but yeah,

The paper, the cursor, the comments, the books
The readers who get what you are saying
The rejections, the queries, the exasperated looks
It’s work when others think that you’re just playing
The blog post when you know you’ve said it best
The last manuscript passed on like all the rest
There’s no life like the writing life
Like no life that I know

Er, sorry, Mr. Berlin.

But truly, you write because you can’t not write.  And you work towards publication because you crave that connection with the reader, even if that connection comes in a package which by default includes rejection.

And no, there is nothing enjoyable about rejection.  Though I can’t find the story online, there is a famous one circulating out there about my old advisor at college who wallpapered his room with rejection letters from literary magazines, spit-in-the-eye to all those people who didn’t take his stories.  He ended up taking them down because they made him feel like crap, but the real spit-in-the-eye wasn’t laughing at rejection but not letting it stop him.  If he had stopped writing, if he had take all those rejections to mean that he wasn’t an amazing writer, he wouldn’t have had this long career as a novelist.

The reality is that rejection happens for many reasons beyond the quality of the project itself.  All editors and agents are looking at your work against all the other work they have in hand (or can predict having in the future) and they weigh it out, trying to make strong financial choices for themselves since publishing is about money and writing is about art.  Writing and publishing actually have very little in common.  What makes a good publication doesn’t necessary make for good writing, and good writing is often passed over because it can’t be marketed well.

When I was a literary magazine editor, I wanted to say no to every story that crossed my path because no’s were easier than yes’s.  A “yes” meant work on my end: I had to contact the writer and send a contract and pay them and edit their work and… “no” was just a form letter in an SASE.  Of course I also had stories I accepted for each issue, but I had to balance out subject matter and length and all sorts of things beyond a great story.  There were so many wonderful stories that I passed on, and when I had the time, I wrote each of those authors directly to let them know exactly what I loved and how sad I was that I couldn’t use it.  I knew it was still rejection, but hopefully it helped the sting.

So, first and foremost, reframe how you look at rejection of your work.  You have rejected dozens of things today.  You turned down all other outfits in your wardrobe to wear the one you have on.  You turned down all other breakfast options to consume the one in your stomach.  Think back in life to all the friendships you didn’t take and all the people you didn’t continue dating.  How many of those rejections were about the worth of the road not taken, and how many of them were choices you made without any meaning attached to the rejections?  I ate yogurt for breakfast, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t like eggs or vegetarian bacon or cereal.  And I hope those breakfast foods aren’t silently crying because I didn’t pick them.  It has nothing to do with them or their worth and everything to do with what I was in the mood for in the moment.

And the same is true for your rejections.  They may have nothing to do with the worth of your work and everything to do with the mood or the needs of the beholder.

Knowing that, the exercise I presented this week to get past a bad comment is the very same one I use after I lick my wounds whenever I’m rejected.  Feel free to engage in this little greyish schadenfreude to get over any hurt feelings you’re experiencing, and then get back to writing.  Write a post, send another query letter, or take a deep breath and continue writing your book.

Because there is no life like the writing life.

Homework: None this week!  Keep writing.

The Colorado shooting was on my mind all day, this strange limbo of wanting to talk about it and not wanting to hear any of the details, so the few things I knew kept rolling around in my head, growing like a tumbleweed as I picked up random bits of passing conversation throughout the day.  I wanted to write about it, mostly just to get it out of my head, but I had nothing to say.  I mean, truly, there is nothing intelligible we can say in the face of an act like this.  The only response to this kind of grief is low moans, wordless sounds.

I was at the Wolvog’s camp when my best friend emailed me about a murder — completely unrelated — that occurred in our town seventeen years ago.  The Colorado shooting fell adjacent to the anniversary of the murder, which took the lives of two of our friends.  I still remember exactly where I was when I found out about it.  It was the summer between my junior and senior year of college, and my boyfriend and I had gone out to coffee with another couple.  We all ended up back at my parent’s house with the intention of going downstairs into the basement to watch a movie.  But my mother stopped my boyfriend and me in the hallway between the living room and kitchen, sending our friends downstairs, and she told me about the murder, which had taken place while I was drinking an iced mocha.  And I remember thinking what a bizarre world this was where I was drinking an iced mocha and this old friend was dead.

I still don’t know what to say.  I didn’t know what to say then, and I certainly don’t know what you say about murder now.  It feels like as I age, I have fewer and fewer words at my disposal, as if we’re born with millions of words which feel like they fit a multitude of situations, and as we age, handfuls get weeded out as our mind tells us that this doesn’t fit and that doesn’t fit.  Until we’re left with silence as a response to this level of violence.

Perhaps that is the only thing I can think to do: a moment of silence.

It’s the anniversary of the Roundup this week.  For six straight years, every single Friday, I post a handful of blog posts that have stuck with me long after closing the screen.  These are not the only posts I read worthy of extra attention.  I keep a running list over the week and then pluck 4 or 5 out in order to keep the Roundup from running 20+ posts long.  I try to spread around the love; though I’m not always successful at remembering who has been honoured recently (and I am guilty of also thinking that I have honoured someone only to discover that while they make my personal list frequently, I’ve never posted them into the Roundup).  I have never taken a submission for the Roundup; it’s just my personal opinion of what grabbed me while I was clicking through the ALI blogosphere.

So happy birthday, Little Roundup.  May you keep getting written for many many more years.

*******

I don’t know why, but these Where is Matt videos always make me cry.

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week as well as the week before.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “What We Owe Each Other” (Unglamourous)
• “The Pursuit Happiness” (Quasi-Momma)
• “Expectations” (Stumbling Gracefully)
• “Believing in the Unbelievable” (From IF to When)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Bereaved and Blessed has a post on something her daughter says.  It’s such a moment of sweetness, but it also ends with a thought-provoking question, one that scared me shitless when I thought about the ending to Max Tivoli.  Looking forward to hearing your thoughts over there.

Why Not Us? has a beautiful post about the knowledge baggage we bring with us.  From the way she watches a pregnancy storyline on a sitcom to a conversation with a friend, she knows too much now about infertility to not have it colour the way she sees the world.  And she wishes she could let it go, even if just for a short while.

My Lazy Ovaries has one of those if you don’t laugh you’ll cry moments as one more thing goes wrong with her cycle.  She writes: “For my next trick ladies and gentlemen, I will fail – completely and utterly – to bleed. Or I should say rather, I HAVE failed. For the first time ever (excepting the nine weeks I spent harboring the blighted ovum).”  She manages to bring humour to an incredibly sucky situation.

Glitter & Rainbows has a goodbye to fertility treatments: “It’s still hard, but I accept it now. There are so many things I want to do, to focus on, to put my mental and physical energy into. I know it’s not going to be a clean break, I’m still going to mourn a little, but the infertility fog has lifted and I am busting out of that tunnel of shittiness.”  It’s a brief post that packs a punch.

Lastly, the Infertility Voice has a post about how her Reader has changed, both with the quietness of summer and the fact that many of the people she started blogging with have moved on to parenting while she’s still in the trenches.  It’s a beautiful analogy of how we affect one another with our stories.

The roundup to the Roundup: It’s the sixth anniversary of the Roundup!  Where is Matt always makes me cry.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between July 13th and July 20th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.